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Two 'Weird' Alien Planets Found Around Bright, Distant Stars | Space.com - 1 views

  • Astronomers using a small ground-based telescope have discovered two unusual alien planets around extremely bright, distant stars.
  • detected using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) in southern Arizona, which has a lens that is roughly as powerful as a high-end digital camera
  • slightly more diminutive than Kepler
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  • KELT-1b, is a massive world that is both incredibly hot and dense. The alien planet, which is mostly metallic hydrogen, is slightly larger than Jupiter, but contains a whopping 27 times the mass
  • completes one orbit in a mere 29 hours
  • surface temperature is likely above 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 2,200 degrees Celsius
  • receiving 6,000 times the amount of radiation that Earth receives from the sun
  • located approximately 825 light-years away in the constellation of Andromeda
  • massive enough that KELT-1 has raised tides on its parent star and actually spun it
  • both KELT-1 and its parent star are locked in each other's gaze as they go around."
  • KELT-2Ab, and is located about 360 light-years away in the constellation of Auriga
  • 30 percent larger than Jupiter with 50 percent more mass.
  • KELT-2Ab's parent star is so bright it can be seen from Earth through binoculars
  • the star is so luminous that researchers will be able to make direct observations of the planet's atmosphere by examining light that shines through it when the star passes within KELT North's field of view again in November.
  • Follow-up observations are also being planned
  • as well as several space observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope.
  • orbits a star that is slightly bigger than the sun, within a binary system
  • one star is slightly bigger than our sun, and the other star is slightly smaller. KELT-2Ab orbits the bigger star, which is bright enough to be seen from Earth with binoculars
  • using the so-called transit method, which involves watching for tiny dips in the star's light that could indicate a planet is crossing, or transiting
  • Rather than staring at a small group of stars at high resolution, the twin KELT North and KELT South telescopes observe millions of very bright stars at low resolution,
  • KELT North scans the northern sky from Arizona
  • KELT South covers the southern sky from Cape Town, South Africa.
  • small ground-based KELT telescopes provide a low-cost alternative for exoplanet hunters by primarily using off-the-shelf technology. The hardware for a KELT telescope costs less than $75,000
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Billions of Habitable Worlds Likely in the Milky Way - 0 views

  • results from a new study that searched for rocky planets in the habitable zones around red dwarf stars
  • now estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy
  • probably about one hundred in the Sun’s immediate neighborhood, less than 30 light years away.
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  • new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet
  • first direct estimate of the number of smaller, rocky planets around red dwarf stars
  • another recent finding which suggested that every star in our night sky has at least one planet circling it — which didn’t include red dwarf stars – and our galaxy could be teeming with worlds
  • HARPS team surveyed a carefully chosen sample of 102 red dwarf stars in the southern skies over a six-year period
  • total of nine super-Earths (planets with masses between one and ten times that of Earth) were found, including two inside the habitable zones of Gliese 581 and Gliese 667 C respectively
  • combining all the data, including observations of stars that did not have planets, and looking at the fraction of existing planets that could be discovered, the team has been able to work out how common different sorts of planets are around red dwarfs
  • find that the frequency of occurrence of super-Earths in the habitable zone is 41% with a range from 28% to 95%.
  • Less than 12% of red dwarfs are expected to have giant planets (with masses between 100 and 1000 times that of the Earth).
  • habitable zone around a red dwarf, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on the surface, is much closer to the star than the Earth is to the Sun
  • But red dwarfs are known to be subject to stellar eruptions or flares, which may bathe the planet in X-rays or ultraviolet radiation, and which may make life there less likely.”
  • Gliese 667 Cc. This is the second planet in this triple star system and seems to be situated close to the center of the habitable zone
  • this planet is more than four times heavier than the Earth it is the closest twin to Earth found so far and almost certainly has the right conditions for the existence of liquid water on its surface
  • second super-Earth planet inside the habitable zone of a red dwarf
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Transiting circumbinary planets Kepler-34 b and Kepler-35 b : Nature : Nature Publishin... - 0 views

  • Received 15 November 2011 Accepted 05 December 2011 Published online 11 January 2012
  • Questions remained, however, about the prevalence of circumbinary planets and their range of orbital and physical properties
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NASA - A New Class of Planetary Systems - 0 views

  •     Kepler    >    Multimedia    >    Images
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Remnants Suggest Comet ISON Still Going: Scientific American - 0 views

  • as ISON got closer to the star
  • Analyses of light captured by NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft seemed to show the comet growing dimmer
  • Next, pictures from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which should have captured ISON on its closest approach to the Sun, showed absolutely nothing
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  • Then the European–US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spotted a faint glimmer on the other side of the Sun, on a trajectory where ISON would have been expected to appear
  • ISON is probably the most observed comet ever
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